I don't believe government should take over the grocery store down the street or own the means of production, but I do believe that the middle class … - Bernie Sanders

First, we must increase the direct payments passed by Congress in December from $600 to $2,000 for every working-class adult and their children. On this issue, Joe Biden, Donald Trump, incoming Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, several Republicans in the House and the Senate and undoubtedly millions of struggling Americans – who wanted more stimulus in December –would agree. But given the enormous crises facing the country, that is not enough. Through reconciliation, we must pass a major Covid-relief package that expands emergency unemployment benefits to $600 a week, provides aid to state and local governments to prevent mass layoffs, enacts hazard pay for frontline workers, saves the US Postal Service, addresses the crisis of homelessness and ensures that no one in America goes hungry or is evicted. During the crisis, we must provide emergency health care to all by requiring Medicare to pay the medical bills of the uninsured and under-insured. We must fully fund Covid-19 testing, tracing and vaccine distribution. At a time when our primary care health care system is faltering, and when millions have no medical home, we must also substantially increase funding for community health centers and the National Health Service Corps, which provides scholarships and forgive student debt of medical professionals who agree to work in underserved areas.

I have been attacked in recent days by President Trump and others for my conviction that people who are incarcerated should be given the right to vote. I make no apologies for that position. Our country has had a long and shameful history of voter suppression. At our founding, despite rhetoric to the contrary, only land-owning white males were given the right to participate in our democracy. Lower income people, Women, Native Americans, African-Americans, and young people were excluded. We have been engaged in an ongoing 243-year project to expand participation in our democracy. Thankfully, we have made much progress in that struggle. But our work is not done — not even close. If we are serious about calling ourselves a democracy, we must firmly establish that the right to vote is an inalienable and universal principle that applies to all American citizens 18 years and older. Period. As American citizens all of us are entitled to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly and all the other freedoms enshrined in our Bill of Rights. We are also entitled to vote. Yes. Even if Trump’s former campaign manager and personal lawyer end up in jail, they should still be able to vote — regardless of who they cast their vote for.

The trouble with debates about public education in the United States is that they rarely have anything to do with education—let alone establishing the habits of analytical thinking and civic engagement that give us the freedom to be more than just cogs in the machinery of corporate America. For the most part, in recent years, education debates at the national level and in communities across this country have been proxy wars for right-wing strategists who see schools as vehicles to advance their divide-and-conquer agenda. Cynical Republicans like Florida governor Ron DeSantis want to argue about whether students and teachers should be required to wear masks during a pandemic, about whether LGBTQ kids should be treated with respect, about whether educators should be allowed to teach the actual history of the United States—as opposed to a truncated version in which fundamental issues are ignored and critical thinking is disregarded. Amid all the political infighting over mask mandates and Critical Race Theory, about test scores and funding mechanisms, we've losing our focus on what matters most in education; the encouragement of students to explore big ideas, to learn how to assess what makes sense and what does not, to become engaged and active citizens who live happy and fulfilling lives. For education to get focused on the real needs, and the real possibilities for students in the twenty-first century, we have to break out the mentality that considers our elementary and secondary schools merely training grounds for workers.